


Eins

by The_Disaster_Tiefling



Series: Crinktober [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Counting, Fear, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Team as Family, numbers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 01:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16187462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Disaster_Tiefling/pseuds/The_Disaster_Tiefling
Summary: Caleb counts because it’s something real, something solid. A truth that couldn’t be taken and twisted against him.





	Eins

    Caleb can feel the others watching him and has to fight the urge to hunker down and hide, trying to pretend that he can’t hear the teasing or the exasperated sighs as he continues to count out the money he needs for his paper and ink. Nott doesn’t complain, but then she’s barely paying attention, used to his quirks by now and more interested in seeing if there’s anything shiny to soothe her itch, but the others are watching, and he knows that they don’t understand. They think it’s just a quirk, another oddity that makes up the oddness that is him, but it’s not…  

   Caleb counts because it’s something real, something solid. A truth that couldn’t be taken and twisted against him. A certainty that he had been able to cling to even during those years he had been locked away, his own mind becoming the enemy.

   He wasn’t sure when it had started. Maybe when he was first learning magic, scrimping and saving to get the materials he needed for each spell. Counting the coins he earned running errands around the village, the little pouch his parents presented him with on his birthday until he had just enough for what he needed. Maybe, it was when he first joined the academy, overwhelmed and lost amongst the other students after living in a small village, it was easier to hide in a corner, to reduce them to numbers than to consider how many there were, and how much more training they’d had.

   He knows for sure that he counted when the lessons started getting harder, when eyes watched his every move, and Trent’s special attention fell on him and his friends.

_Eins. Zwei. Drei._

Caleb. Astrid. Eodwulf.  

    In their small world, it was just the three of them, they studied together, ate together, snatched moments of respite and mischief between the lectures and punishments. Perhaps, if he had been less focused, less fixated on those numbers, he would have realised how narrow their world was becoming until it felt like there was nothing beyond the three of them. Later, when his mind cleared, and guilt gnawed away at him, he would realise that some part of him had known that something was wrong because he had never once included Trent in the numbers of his world… he had been outside, even when he had been the centre of everything.

_Eins. Zwei._

Mother. Father.

    He counted as the flames climbed up the walls of his house, hungry and wild, wrought by his hands but not belonging to him as he felt the eyes on his back. Watching. Waiting. _Eins. Zwei._  He could hear their screams, and he forced himself to count the seconds before they were lost to the roar of the flames, feeling himself splintering and shattering as their voices disappeared. _Eins. Zwei._ His hands were trembling, his vision blurred with tears, red creeping over his skin as the weight of what he had just done, the lives he had just taken settled on his shoulders. _Eins. Zwei. Drei._ He knew, even as his knees buckled, a broken cry spilling from his lips that he had failed. That he had destroyed three lives with his flames, and he screamed, the numbers playing on repeat in the back of his mind even as everything else disappeared into a smoke-filled haze.

Then there was one.

   He didn’t know who he was, or where he was. All he had was that number, _Eins,_ and the empty, despairing feeling that there should have been more.

*

    When his mind and memories returned, he almost wished they hadn’t as he forced to relieve what he had done. What he had destroyed. _Eins. Zwei. Drei._

Astrid and Eodwulf.

His mother and father.

Himself – the Caleb Widogast who’d had a future.

    It was all gone. Trent was gone, although the tendrils of his words and control lingered, so intricately entwined with the fractured fragments of his soul, that he didn’t know where Caleb ended, and Trent began. However, the numbers remained. Trent wasn’t a number, and he was the reason why Caleb was alone…why all he had was _Eins._

Then came Nott.

    He hadn’t been looking for a companion. He couldn’t let someone get that close again, and then they’d thrown her into the jail cell he’d found himself in. At first, he had been frightened, hiding in his corner, clinging to his numbers. It wasn’t that she was a Goblin, it was that she would look at him with wide, frightened eyes, searching for something he wasn’t sure how to give. He didn’t want to open up, to become more than one, because that was a path to pain. A route to loss.

It didn’t last.

   It’s hard to ignore someone when you share the same tiny space for days on end, and one day he found himself passing her the larger half of the rock-hard bread that had been shoved into their cell. Another day he caught her when she was thrown into the cell, feeling her freeze with fear, waiting for him to hurt her and that was the moment his resolve broke, and he found himself pulling her close, absorbing her trembling.

    However, it was only when they fled, her tiny hand grasped in his, flames erupting behind them that he started to count again.

_Eins. Zwei._

   Nott and Caleb. Caleb and Nott. For weeks it was just the two of them, skulking and hiding in the shadows – Nott hiding from the fearful glances, the prejudices against Goblins that saw doors slammed in their faces and rocks tossed in their direction. Caleb, hiding from the past, from the weight, the guilt that dogged his every step. Those days were tense and frightened, and yet in the other, they both found a foundation – Caleb never flinched from her, unfazed by the pointed teeth, the itch that drove her fingers into places best left alone and Nott…Nott didn’t care what he had done, what he had been. She cared about the here and now, about the man who could make fire with his hands and keep them safe and warm, and who needed her just as much as she needed him.

    It was weeks later that he dared to reach out, to reclaim a bit of his past. In a filthy inn, in a room paid for with stolen coin, he counted out his materials with the same patience he had as a child, and with Nott watching with child-like fascination he cast Find Familiar for the first time in years. He wasn’t sure that he was worthy, that anything would answer his call, or that they would be open to his whims if they did.

   Then Frumpkin was there, purring and curling in his lap, wary but not flinching away from the Goblin girl who slept curled up with them that night.

_Eins. Zwei. Drei._

*

     It was supposed to be a brief stop, a chance to sleep in a warm bed for once and refill their supplies with what little coin they had managed to amass. It wasn’t supposed to become something more, to add more people to his small world. _Eins. Zwei. Drei._ Nott, Caleb and Frumpkin. He wanted to cling to what he was, what he had, counting them over and over, even as he found himself swept along by the flow, unable to deny Nott when he saw the light in her eyes.

     He wasn’t sure when he started to count them too. Was it in the dark of the night, with an enchanted voice raised in song around them as they fought for their lives…as Nott stood guard over him, but it was the others who rushed to heal him, to make sure that he was alive.

_Eins. Zwei. Drei...Vier. Fünf. Sechs. Sieban._

    Was it in the mines, when he watched as Beau raced to rescue Nott, to protect the centre of his world, without any hesitation or thought to the fact that she was helping a Goblin? Or, when he revealed the raw wound in his heart, the flames letting these newcomers glimpse the darkness beneath the surface? Or perhaps it had been when Molly had rushed forward, pressing a kiss to his forehead, chasing away the past.

He counted them that night when he finally came back to himself. Needing the certainty, the knowledge that they were still there against the backdrop of flames in his memory. That they were alive and well.

_Eins. Zwei. Drei._

_Nott, Caleb and Frumpkin._

_Vier. Fünf. Sechs. Sieban._

_Jester. Fjord. Beau. Mollymauk._

    It would be later, after miles on the road ended in the bathhouse in Zadash that he would consider adding Yasha to the list, even though he knew there was a chance she would slip away again and despite the part of him that had half-expected never to see her again. There was something about her quietness that soothed and called him, sensing a kindred spirit. And it was in the depths of Zadash, as she moved to cover them without hesitation, taking blows that would have laid him flat, that he added her to the list.

_Acht._

    They were numbers he would count over and over, sometimes late at night as he kept watch, eyes roving over their sleeping forms. Under his breath, as they recovered in the aftermath of a fight, leaning on one another and celebrating the fact that they were still alive. In the quiet, as he worked on his spells, peering around the tavern as they drank and laughed, and lived. In the frantic beating of his heart, as he told Beau and Nott the truth about what he had done. Through the terror as Fjord held a blade to his throat. In the roaring of adrenaline as they emerged as champions after the pit. On the road, as they fled the war, following a new path – meeting new people, clashing and fighting, finding a rhythm that would work for their disparate group.

And in his grief, when one fell.

    He counted them more after that, once they were together again, bound together by blood and loss. Bound by experiences and promises, and a life left unfulfilled. It was painful to look at the strange Firbolg who saw too much and who had helped them when no one else would and see a new piece of this peculiar family that he had never looked for. He never stopped counting Mollymauk, he couldn’t, but as they travelled, and he watched Caduceus confront the strange world they were showing him, he found himself counting him too, a sad smile on his lips as he realised that they now matched the name he had given them.

_Nein._


End file.
